China’s Sci-Fi Images: Constructing Alternate Technological Futures

Abstract How does science fiction from the Global South contribute to the construction of alternative technological futures? In light of this question, we argue that, as a constitutive component of visions of the future, science fiction can support alternate and critical sociotechnical imaginaries, challenging modern technology’s hegemonic discourse. Our argument is based on the Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature that understands technology as a central dimension for the analysis of international dynamics by the way it intertwines and shapes the system and its units in dense sociotechnical systems, in addition to being concomitantly shaped by them. However, not very common in this literature are analytical categories that situate technologies in materially, morally, and socially integrated frameworks, as is abundantly offered by science fiction. Through utopias and dystopias, we understand that science fiction literature formulates and offers sociotechnical imaginaries that codify our worldview on technological changes and ways of social organization. With this in mind, we mobilize the concept of technodiversity, as well as Chinese science fiction works – by authors such as Han Song, Hao Jingfang and Liu Cixin – in order to rearticulate the issue of technology and identify a multiplicity of cosmotechnics. Given the crises produced by the cosmovision of technology as an exclusively productive force and capitalist mechanism, it is necessary to contemplate the existence of alternative technological futures under different cosmotechnical conceptions.